South Asia Citizens Web

Discussion in Urdu on the celebrated progressive writer Saadan Hasan Manto on Rajya Sabha TV -a public television network

It is a novel way to ‘improve’ educational standards by any yardstick. The Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education has decided to rejig the school curriculum to obscure certain historic facts, cleverly add a few new ones and put a twist on others. So, we find no reference to Jawaharlal Nehru being the first prime minister of India, no mention of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination.

My reason for writing this narrative is that I want to face the demons. I want to make sense of the things that happened to me. But not just for me. I want people to know, especially the young girls and women who are conditioned to endure violence and who are silently fighting abuse. I want them to know that they are not alone in this fight. To the society that pretends it is a private matter, I want to say loud and clear that domestic abuse is real.

Under the Modi regime What one is witnessing is more than cultural McCarthyism. To the witch-hunt, we are adding a cultural uprooting, inquisition-style. To the overt brutality of violence, one has to add the deeper violence of cultural disruption.

The Indian Cultural Forum interviewed historian Gopinath Ravindran about the current establishment’s agenda for Indian historical research. Ravindran, who teaches at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, was Member Secretary of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) till he resigned halfway through his term in 2015.